This summer, as Nosheen Iqbal observes, politicians seem to have started saying things about refugees and migrants that would have been unsayable a decade ago.
Whether it is the shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick, writing that he would not want his daughters living near ‘men from backward countries who broke into Britain illegally’, or Reform MPs claiming women in the UK are at risk of being assaulted by men from ‘predominantly Muslim countries’, something seems to have shifted in the way politicians talk about asylum and migration.
Dr Maya Goodfellow analyses this worrying trend in British politics that goes all the way up to the government, with politicians frequently adopting the language of the far right, and identifying asylum seekers as criminal and a threat to young women and girls.
Photograph: Martin Pope/Getty Images
